


Lion Rampant, Contourné

by yeats



Category: 12th Century CE RPF, The Lion in Winter (1968)
Genre: Gen, M/M, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-18
Updated: 2018-12-18
Packaged: 2019-09-22 02:29:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17051360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yeats/pseuds/yeats
Summary: Mothers, like fathers, live in sons.





	Lion Rampant, Contourné

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MixolydianGrey](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MixolydianGrey/gifts).



Richard is fifteen when Eleanor finds out.

They are on a tour of the Aquitaine, a gesture of reconciliation after two years of unrest: the Duchess with her newly-named heir beside her. It's nearly Michaelmas, yet a late summer haze still lies over the countryside with the indolent allure of a lady unfurling her bilaut. It seems as if her ancestral lands have outdone themselves to greet their future ruler. Something inside her chest that's been too long frozen thaws, bit by bit.

This land will be Richard's. Henry will not touch it again.

The people come out to greet the royal entourage as they pass, lining the roadsides in the towns and raising their heads from their work in the green-and-gold striped fields. Richard rides beside her and she amuses herself by watching him, his high and noble carriage in the saddle and the way his sharp blue-grey eyes catalogue each sight along their route. 

His hair is Angevin red, but after days in the hot sun it is shot through with bands of yellow. He smiles and waves at her subjects -- at his future subjects -- without being bade to do so, every inch the lord of the Aquitaine. At fifteen he's already almost as tall as his father, and clearly not done growing. He'll be tall like Eleanor, like _her_ father was -- another part of him she has claimed for herself, rather than leave to Henry's indifferent clutches.

In Limoges, they lay the ceremonial first stone in the foundation of the abbey of Saint-Augustin, his hands steadying the block as she deftly applies a thick layer of mortar with a trowel. (She could be a mason, for all the stone-laying ceremonies she’s officiated over the years.) At Bordeaux and Périgueux, Richard sits beside her, attentive and grave beyond his years, as she settles land disputes and other local matters.

The first time she turns to Richard and asks for his opinion, the hall falls silent. She speaks to him in the langue d'oc, of course, but he has enough of his father's look about him that the courtiers still mistrust this Norman creature to meddle in southern affairs.

But the advice that Richard gives is sound; she's made sure of it in advance -- even if his voice does crack as he gives it, youth and nerves combined. She pretends to consider the suggestion for a moment, and then agrees to repeal the levies Henry had placed on the Aquitaine. She watches as those assembled pass from wary acceptance to genuine appreciation, and bites back a smile. Brick by brick, she is establishing Richard as her heir, just like those redoubtable abbey walls -- one that Henry's whims and caprices will not tear down.

September bleeds into October, and they circle back to Poitiers on ever-shortening days. The whole court troops out to greet them in the forecourt, with her loyal seneschal at the head. "My lady," Raoul de Faye bows, stepping forward to help her dismount. But Richard beats him to it, springing down off his horse and offering his hand.

The appreciative murmurs of the assembled courtiers at this chivalrous gesture do not escape her notice -- just as she'd planned when she whispered her instructions to him.

"Are you happy living here, Maman?" Richard asks later, as they walk arm-in-arm through the shaded cloister passage at the center of the castle. 

She covers his hand on her forearm with her own. "Indeed I am."

"Not too many memories?" She can feel his keen gaze searching her face. Earlier, during their tour of the castle, she had shown him the hall where she and Henry had celebrated their wedding feast, pointed out the tapestry hung in their honor. Twenty years of sunlight falling at an unfortunate angle had bleached out the faces of the happy bride and groom, leaving them headless mannequins, hands enjoined.

"Oh, a thousand memories at least," she says. "But few of them unhappy ones. This is not a land for sorrow, my dear. It does not agree with the climate."

At supper, she takes pride of place at the head of the table with Richard in Henry's seat beside her. Her vassals have come to pay them tribute from as far away as Agen and Bayonne, and it pleases her to watch them take the measure of her son one by one. Three hundred leagues' distant, at another table in cold and gray England, another woman sits in her place, but the thought of it galls her less here. Let Henry feed and fete his Welsh beauty in Woodstock; Eleanor calls for bards and jongleurs and makes merry in Poitiers. That misty island drifts away into the vast and depthless ocean.

That night, another brick is laid when she coaxes Richard to sing one of his own compositions after supper. Beet red, he complies, taking up the lute from the startled bard, a young man with dusty blond hair and hazel eyes who reminds her (memories, everywhere she turns) of a louche version of young Louis. 

"My lord," the bard stammers.

Richard's big hands -- when had they gotten so big? -- cradle the instrument with an incongruous delicacy, his fingers picking out a desultory melody, testing out the strings. The look on his face is tender and distant.

"Come now," Eleanor prompts. "Mother's getting tired."

"Mother is a liar," Richard says, with a quicksilver grin. He begins to play in earnest, a slow and lilting melody that tracks up and then down again. He adds his voice in harmony, a strong tenor that does not break as he had earlier in court. 

Eleanor smiles, and watches the rest of the room. For the first time, she sees real fear in the eyes of the few recalcitrant vassals whom Henry had deigned to let live after the last fitful stirrings of rebellion. A duke of Aquitaine who is strong and wise and handsome is one thing, but one who combines all that with the soul of a poet? She knows they are remembering her father William. Both of her northerner husbands have struggled to tame the Aquitaine, but her son will not be an outsider, for all that he was born in England. No, she has brought back a true southern lord to one day rule the south -- and everyone will know it.

The audience cheers and asks for an encore, and then another -- Richard complies, with all the magnanimous grace of a benevolent ruler indulging his subjects. Eleanor slips out somewhere around the third refrain, safe in the knowledge that the foundation of the edifice they are building is sound.

The autumn chill has sunk into the flagstones in her chamber in the Maubergeonne Tower. One of the serving girls lights a fire in the great hearth as she undresses, and she dismisses her ladies-in-waiting rather than invite them to bunk in with her, as she and her sister Pétronille often did in their youth before they each found more exciting partners to warm their beds.

Tonight, however, sleep is an even more absent bedfellow than Henry, and sometime in the small hours of the morning she gives it up as a lost cause, too.

Her feet find the soft slippers at the foot of her bed and she shoulders her kirtle back on again, wrapping a cloak around her shoulders and slipping from her room. As a child, she would often pace at night, and though five decades of living have weighed down her body, she feels light again as she trails through the silent halls.

Richard's door is ajar; a parabola of light spills out onto the floor. She wonders if he, too, can sense the restless spirits of her ancestors -- William her grandfather, perhaps, or Dangereuse, his scandalous mistress whom he kept in this same tower as it pleased her. It would amuse him, she thinks, to hear those stories. She can't remember if she's told them before, but in any case they seem different here in Poitiers. 

She places her hand on the door, eases it open so as not to creak the hinges….

The overfull moon, whose thick and waxy glow she mistook for a midnight candle, spills in through the window, revealing Eleanor's mistake.

Richard is not awake. He lies slumbering in his bed, bare-chested with a blanket drawn over his waist -- and with the lithe body of the bard from earlier tucked snug against his side.

Eleanor does not make a sound. Eleanor hardly breathes. She allows herself five heartbeats of shock, five more of dismay, and ten at herself. How could she have not seen this coming?

No. That can't be right. She knows Richard. She has always known Richard.

She shuts the door. 

Well. These things do happen. So much of what's best in life, she has found, lies beyond the the gravest imprecations of sour-faced clergy. Surely this cannot be any different. (She thinks of Thomas Becket, then, for reasons she understands perfectly well but leaves aside nonetheless.) By the time she makes her way back to her room and settles back into her cold marital bed, her heartbeat has returned to normal. This changes nothing, she tells herself. Except….

She can use this, she's sure. One day, she will break Henry with this knowledge, will use it to cut through him like the knife she has always wished that propriety allowed her to carry lashed to her waist.

And Richard will have everything a son of hers could ever want. 

Eleanor dreams of a lion stalking through the halls of the castle, a great beast like the ones she saw when she traveled the Holy Land in her youth. His eyes are blue-grey, his mane streaked with gold... and atop his mighty head, he wears a crown.

She wakes smiling.

**Author's Note:**

> The title means "Lion, standing on its hind legs, facing left," and is a reference to one of Richard's [possible coats of arms.](http://bit.ly/2Cxm0wx)
> 
> Dear MixolydianGrey,
> 
> Thank you so much for requesting fic for the greatest Christmas movie of all time! (Suck it, "Die Hard.")
> 
> In your letter, you said you wanted something that built off of Richard and Eleanor's dynamic in "The Lion in Winter." I tried to add a missing scene for you, but I soon realized it's pretty much a perfectly written screenplay (based on the perfectly written play), so instead I've added a bit of backstory to their relationship. I tried my best to adhere to the actual 12th century chronology, with a bit of license that I felt was in the spirit of the film. Anyway, thank you for providing me with the perfect excuse to write something about these two fascinating characters, and I hope you have a very happy Yuletide!
> 
> -[yeats](https://archiveofourown.org/users/yeats/profile)
> 
> (Thanks as well to [traveller](https://archiveofourown.org/users/traveller) and [inabathrobe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/inabathrobe) for their kindness and encouragement in helping me finish this, and to arch for watching the movie with me in the guise of “research.”)


End file.
